Bereishit Addendum
The Profound Word
Howard S. Joseph
http://TheProfoundWord.com
Dear friends,
Thank you for joining me in this Neziv project. I have been contemplating it for a long time. Now that I am somewhat retired I hope to accomplish it. It is important to me to have the opportunity to spread the teachings of someone who has guided and inspired me for so many years. I hope you will benefit in the same way. Please feel free to share these pages with anyone you would like.
A bit of housekeeping information:
Please notice the blog address that I have created on the web. This will help manage the distribution of the weekly Parashah. Please go there and register so you can receive it from there. I will give the process a couple of weeks and will still send it directly to you meanwhile.
I will also be putting other materials on the blog, some Neziv related and others as well. I hope to get permission to put my book about him on the website as well as an article I wrote. We will see.
I was quite rushed last week to prepare the first item. So I would like to add this addendum to clarify some of the issues that were raised.
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What is prompting Neziv’s focus on the word Elohim that is usually translated as God? I would venture that if we had in the text Bereishit bara Ha-Bore – in the beginning the Creator created, we would not have been surprised or disappointed. But we find instead that the Creator is given a name – Elohim. That must mean something; but what?
Usually a name is given to something based on how we experience it. Therefore, we wonder, what experience lies behind the term Elohim?
We know that the term elohim comes from the world of everyday experience. It actually means judges- dayyanim in Hebrew. We see this in Exodus 21 where a master is bidden to take his servant to elohim to resolve an issue. The ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah translates elohim as dayyania.
What role do judges play in society? They restore order when there is a question or problem that has to be resolved. They consider the issues and competing interests and claims at stake and render a decision. They restore and promote order through a process of din, judgement.
So, the use of the term elohim to describe the Creator suggests to Neziv that we experience the creation of the Creator as an orderly system. The Creator too has created order out of chaos by balancing the forces of nature through the laws of nature.
Furthermore, these laws of nature are equal to the laws of the Torah. It is Torah law that is part of the very structure of the natural world ordered by Elohim. Calling the Creator Elohim is a personal approach based on our experience of the orderliness of the universe.
Neziv then moves on to what I called the cemetery blessing – one that has fallen into disuse in many areas. [We rabbis are partly to blame: this blessing is not said unless you have not been to a cemetery for thirty days. It is rare that rabbis do not visit a cemetery once in thirty days. So they often forget to remind others to recite it. It is interesting that the Sephardi versions of the blessing that I have seen do not mention ‘and caused you to die in din’.] In this blessing we address the inhabitants of the cemetery and recognize the significance of din in their lives. They are the testimony to the forces of life and death that permeate the world.
Does the blessing serve another purpose as well? Maybe it is supposed to comfort us. Do not think that death comes because of a sin or better, a failure on our part – which is what het really means in Hebrew. Your beloved was a good person – do not think of them as a sinner, as a failure. Death is natural, part of the necessary din process by which the world is structured. It is inescapable. Healthy human beings must learn to accept these facts like any other facts of existence.
So if the universe sometimes appears as unfriendly it is not because Elohim did not try to make it so. Midrash Rabbah speaks of God as creating and destroying many worlds before ours was made. We do not know if this was an actual series of events or reflects the planning stages in which various possibilities were considered and rejected or accepted. Again, it reflects a process of din, considered judgement by the Creator Elohim until a viable and workable universe could exist.
Of course, if Torah laws are at the foundation of the world order then it is necessary for us to know them in order to live a good life: hence our constant declarations of gratitude to Elohim for having revealed them to us. Without them we cannot live.
There are other names of God in the Torah. The most important one is the four letter Hebrew word that we no longer know how to pronounce. It represents the most personal name of God and we see it written Y-H-W-H. It suggests to us more the quality of rahamim, love, compassion, care and mercy that we also experience in God. There is a lot more to say about this name but we will hopefully come back to it.
Meanwhile, I wish you Shavua Tov and Hodesh Tov on the occasion of Rosh Hodesh Heshvan.
http://TheProfoundWord.com